Letter from the Archive: The Ketchup Conundrum

If you’re looking for something to talk about around the grill this weekend, look no further than Malcolm Gladwell’s “The Ketchup Conundrum.” It addresses a fundamental, hamburger-and-hot-dog-related question: Why are there so many varieties of mustard—yellow, spicy, Dijon, honey—while there’s only one kind of ketchup? (This despite the “57 Varieties” advertised on the Heinz label.)

Gladwell answers this question in a delightfully roundabout way: by engaging with the long-running, quasi-philosophical debate about the nature of taste. Is there one correct way for something to taste, or is it natural for there to be lots of different varieties? Gladwell talks to a food scientist named Howard Moskowitz, a man who’s famous for discovering that, at least when it comes to spaghetti sauce, variety should rule. (Moskowitz’s work on sauce was done for Prego, which is owned by Campbell’s soup.)

[W]orking with the Campbell’s kitchens, he came up with forty-five varieties of spaghetti sauce. These were designed to differ in every conceivable way: spiciness, sweetness, tartness, saltiness, thickness, aroma, mouth feel, cost of ingredients, and so forth. He had a trained panel of food tasters analyze each of those varieties in depth.… When Moskowitz charted the results, he saw that everyone had a slightly different definition of what a perfect spaghetti sauce tasted like.…

It may be hard today, fifteen years later—when every brand seems to come in multiple varieties—to appreciate how much of a breakthrough this was. In those years, people in the food industry carried around in their heads the notion of a platonic dish—the version of a dish that looked and tasted absolutely right. At Ragú and Prego, they had been striving for the platonic spaghetti sauce.… Cooking, on the industrial level, was consumed with the search for human universals. Once you start looking for the sources of human variability, though, the old orthodoxy goes out the window. Howard Moskowitz stood up to the Platonists and said there are no universals.

So why, if there are no food universals, does ketchup persist in its pure, platonic form? To find out, you’ll have to read the whole story; it’s available to everyone in our online archive.

Photograph: Martin Parr/Magnum.

Joshua Rothman is The New Yorker’s archive editor. He is also a frequent contributor to newyorker.com, where he writes a blog about books and ideas.